AWS · Exam reference
About the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam
Scenario-based practice for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam (SAA-C03). Every question is a short architecture problem with a stated constraint, and every explanation says why the tempting wrong answer fails as well as why the right one wins.
10
Sample questions
130 min
Exam time limit
72%
Practice pass mark
$150
Exam voucher
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) is the AWS certification most cloud engineers sit first, and the one hiring managers actually recognise. You get 65 questions in 130 minutes and a scaled score out of 1,000, with 720 to pass. Fifteen of those questions are unscored trial items that look identical to the rest, so pacing is part of the test: about two minutes per question, all the way through. What fails candidates is rarely the service list. Almost every item is a short scenario with four plausible options where two of them would technically work and only one meets the constraint written into the question. "With the least operational overhead" is asking for the managed service. "Without changing the application code" rules out anything that needs an SDK call. "Must survive the loss of an Availability Zone" separates Multi-AZ from read replicas. People who revise by memorising service descriptions read all four options as correct and then guess. The blueprint has four domains: Design Secure Architectures at 30 percent, Design Resilient Architectures at 26, Design High-Performing Architectures at 24, and Design Cost-Optimized Architectures at 20. Security is the biggest block, and most of it is IAM policy evaluation, VPC boundaries, and where encryption keys live, not anything exotic. AWS suggests around a year of hands-on experience designing solutions on the platform. If you have that and you still miss questions, the gap is almost always reading the constraint rather than knowing the service.
Exam Domains Covered
Exam Format & Details
65 questions in 130 minutes, all multiple choice (one correct answer of four) or multiple response (two or more correct answers of five or more). Only 50 questions are scored; the other 15 are unscored trial items that are not identified on the exam, so treat all 65 as real. Results come back as a scaled score from 100 to 1,000 with 720 to pass, and the model is compensatory: you do not have to pass each domain, only the exam overall. There are no labs, simulations or drag-and-drop items. The seat costs 150 USD and is booked through Pearson VUE or PSI at a test centre or online.
Why Practice Questions Matter
Reading about S3 storage classes will not teach you to recognise which one a scenario is describing. SAA-C03 questions are decided in one constraint sentence, and the only way to train for that is to read a lot of scenarios and have the misses explained. Every question here gives the reasoning for the correct answer and, more usefully, why each distractor fails: why Multi-AZ is not a read-scaling answer, why a NAT gateway is not a security control, why Glacier Deep Archive breaks a four-hour recovery target. Work by domain first, then run timed sets of 65 in 130 minutes so pacing stops being a variable on the day.
Sample Practice Questions
The following questions are a preview of the type of syllabus-aligned questions you will practise in CertCrush. They reflect the format and reasoning style of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam — not actual exam content.
Q1.A regional charity runs its donor management application in one Region. The trustees have stated that in a regional disaster a full day of downtime is acceptable, and they have asked for the lowest possible ongoing cost because unspent donations fund programmes. The architect must choose a disaster recovery strategy for the second Region. Which strategy meets these requirements?
- A.Backup and restore, copying backups to the second Region and running nothing there between disasters
- B.Pilot light, keeping the database replicating and running in the second Region with compute switched off
- C.Warm standby, running a scaled-down but fully working copy of the environment in the second Region
- D.Multi-site active-active, serving donors from both Regions at full capacity
Domain: Design Resilient Architectures
Q2.A university research office receives data from genomics instruments, survey tools and partner institutions in a mix of CSV, JSON and Parquet files. It wants one central store holding the data in its original format, with structure applied when the data is read rather than when it is written, so that SQL queries, Spark jobs and machine learning training can all read the same copy without loading it into each engine first. Which service should form the foundation of this design?
- A.Amazon S3
- B.Amazon Redshift
- C.Amazon EFS
- D.Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Domain: Design High-Performing Architectures
Q3.An online education provider gives its on-call engineers a role with the AdministratorAccess policy attached. During an incident the engineers only ever need to read the application's CloudWatch log group and restart the EC2 instances belonging to that application. Security wants least privilege without slowing incident response. What should the solutions architect do?
- A.Create a role whose permissions policy allows only the required log-read and instance restart actions on that application's resources, and have the on-call engineers assume it.
- B.Keep the AdministratorAccess role but require a manager to approve each use before an engineer assumes it.
- C.Replace AdministratorAccess with an account-wide read-only policy for the on-call role.
- D.Create an IAM user with access keys for each on-call engineer, scoped to the application's resources.
Domain: Design Secure Architectures
Q4.A payments processor is designing a settlement pipeline on an Amazon SQS FIFO queue. Settlement instructions for a given merchant account must be applied in strict order, but instructions for different merchant accounts are independent. Load testing shows the producer needs to sustain about 2,500 instructions per second, and the current implementation sends one message per SendMessage call and is being throttled. Which solution meets the throughput requirement while preserving the required ordering?
- A.Send messages in batches of ten with the merchant account identifier as the message group ID.
- B.Replace the FIFO queue with a standard queue and send messages in batches of ten.
- C.Add more consumer instances so that messages are received and deleted faster.
- D.Create ten FIFO queues and have the producer hash each merchant account to one of them, sending one message per call.
Domain: Design Resilient Architectures
Q5.A brokerage runs a monolithic trading application that requires a vendor supplied kernel module to be loaded at boot and expects a full operating system it can configure. A rewrite has been quoted at two years and rejected by the board. The platform team must move the application to AWS within six months and wants it to run behind a load balancer with automatic replacement of unhealthy nodes. Which solution meets these requirements?
- A.Run the application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer
- B.Containerise the application and run it as an Amazon ECS service on AWS Fargate
- C.Refactor the application into AWS Lambda functions behind an Application Load Balancer
- D.Deploy the application with AWS App Runner from a container image
Domain: Design High-Performing Architectures
Frequently Asked Questions
What is included in the free AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) sample?
The free sample includes 10 syllabus-aligned practice questions, sample flashcards, and a preview chapter from the study guide. No account or payment is required to try the sample.
How many questions are in the full AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) course?
The full course includes a comprehensive question bank covering all exam domains. You can see the total question count on the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) course page.
Are these official AWS exam questions?
No. CertCrush questions are independently written and syllabus-aligned — they mirror the format, difficulty, and reasoning style of the official exam. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS.
Which domains does the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) course cover?
The course covers 4 exam domains: Design Secure Architectures, Design Resilient Architectures, Design High-Performing Architectures, Design Cost-Optimized Architectures.
Can I study on mobile?
Yes. CertCrush is fully responsive and works on phones, tablets, and desktops. The timed exam, flashcards, and study guide all work on mobile without installing an app.
What happens when I create an account?
Creating a free account lets you access full courses, track your weak areas by domain, and resume practice sessions across devices. No credit card is required to register.